Payoffs are definitely not restricted to finance, but also exist in evolutionary theory. Basically, we humans observe the world around us, but not in the sense of truth, but of evolutionary payoffs: we evolve by becoming better at surviving as a race.
Our minds show us "reality", but these are only interfaces: spacetime is such an interface, but it is doomed as a fundamental concept. A more useful concept would be a conscious agent (as Donald Hoffman calls it), in which any combination of them would be a conscious agent in itself. This would be a scale-invariant fractal-like way to describe Reality.